From New York to Latin America, from Europe to the Middle East, Omicron does not stop its run. To the sound of daily records, driven by the high contagiousness of the variant, the world is facing an avalanche of positives – more than 2 million per day on average in the first week of the year. But if cases fly, deaths seem to slow down, with an average of 6,237 daily victims since the beginning of the year, to a 15-month low, fueling hopes that the new strain will be less lethal, especially among vaccinated people. In New York, over 90,000 new positives have been recorded in the last 24 hours – at the highest since the start of the pandemic – and 154 deaths have been recorded. In some neighborhoods, the positivity rate is as high as 35%, nearly five times the levels of last winter, with peaks close to 50% in the Bronx.
A situation that is inevitably putting the hospital system in a growing emergency, close to 12 thousand hospitalizations. The infections also fly to Mexico – the fifth most affected country in the world for the number of victims behind the United States, Brazil, India and Russia – and Peru, where new records are recorded, with more than 30 thousand and 16 thousand cases respectively in one day. In Africa, 10 million cases have been exceeded, according to data from the African Union health department, which also counts over 231 thousand victims. Among the most affected states is South Africa, where Omicron was discovered at the end of November.
New absolute peaks also in the Philippines (28,707 new infected), where President Rodrigo Duterte had threatened arrest for no vaxes who do not respect the lockdown. The variant is also rampant in the Middle East, with records in Kuwait and Qatar, where some restrictions have been reintroduced, and cases tripled in a week in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, the decline in infections in the United Kingdom continues for the fifth day in a row, after the record of over 200 thousand on Tuesday, giving hope for a definitive descent of the curve. And while monitoring the evolution of the virus continues, with the magnifying glass on new possible strains of interest such as Deltacron, the combination of Delta and Omicron identified in Cyprus, the push for boosters does not stop. From 1 February, in Greece anyone who has not received the third dose 7 months after the second will be considered by the authorities as not vaccinated. (HANDLE)